Huge Canyon Discovered Beneath Red Sea

Below:

Next story in Science

A canyon more than 800-foot-deep has been discovered on the floor
of the Red Sea by the U.K. Royal Navy's HMS Enterprise, using an
echo sounder that produce 3D images of the feature.

The survey ship was probing the topography of the
bottom of the Red Sea as part of a mission to better
understand the waters of the Red Sea west of Suez, Egypt, and
their safety for shipping and navigation, according to a release
from the U.K. Ministry of Defence (MoD).

The multibeam echo sounder used by the ship sends out pulses of
sound waves that bounce of seafloor features and return back to
the instrument. The longer it takes for a pulse echo to return,
the deeper the seafloor feature off which it bounced. (This
method has also been used to map
the Challenger Deep, the deepest spot in the Earth's oceans.)

The data from the sounder can be compiled into a 3D image of the
ocean floor.

The commanding office of the Enterprise, Derek Rae, said that the
canyon could have been created by ancient rivers cutting through
the layers of rock before the area was flooded and became the Red
Sea.

There is also the possibility that it is a younger feature, he
said in the release, scoured by underwater currents and still in
the process of being formed. Or they could have been formed by
some combination of the two processes, he added.

"It is, however, almost certain to say that this is the closest
that humans will ever get to gaze upon these truly impressive
sights hundreds of meters beneath the surface," Rae said.

The Enterprise is scheduled to stay in the Middle East until the
summer, further mapping the seafloor. Its sister ship, the HMS
Echo, was previously in the region for a 19-month deployment and
found several shipwrecks and other obstacles.